Me and two-thirds of my family left the ranch yesterday to head to El Paso for the sole purpose of meeting Mom and John there to celebrate her birthday. We managed to get the house cleaned and all the animals fed and put where they belonged and leave IN TIME. Props to us on that one.

Then ... the driveway. We've got about 2 feet deep ruts in places where the sticky mud lives happily during the day and freezes at night. So it was a rough trip but I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until we got out of the five-mile long driveway and onto the main road. And I noticed a hard knocking "thump-thump" sound and I stopped.

And said, "That doesn't sound good. Do you think it's the mud flying out from underneath the truck?"

No, no it wasn't.

It was this *ahem* little problem.


Here's the thing. We all were dressed in our cute going-to-town clothes and shoes, except for my knee-high rubber boots that I was still wearing with my dress slacks tucked into them. Sexy, uh-huh.

So Micah and Katie get to work on getting the jack out and getting the truck jacked up. We decided to just leave the truck where it was in the middle of the road since we were in plain view of oncoming traffic from both directions.

Elsie's reaction was classic. She started walking up the hill with her cellphone trying to get service until I said, "Elsie, even if you get service, who are you going to call?"

"Um, I don't know," she replied. And she walked back. I loved her reaction because it is totally something I would do.

As for me, well, I stood there with my phone and took these pictures. Micah even commented about how I was going to blog about this later. He is so right!

The next picture depicts Micah's concern with Katie's shirt riding up while she was bending over to try and get the spare tire out from underneath the truck.

"Katie, we don't want people stopping for other things besides trying to help us," was his reason, which I thought was quite funny. So while she bent over, he held her shirt down and looked at the oncoming car.

Someone stopped! It was someone who had (sped) by in the opposite direction and then turned around and came back. Let me just say - we weren't helpless! Yeah, we got stuck a little bit on lowering the spare tire out from underneath the truck and we were glad the man did it for us because it was MUDDY and none of us felt like getting THAT dirty. So here is the kind man who helped us and got us back on the road.

Despite the severity of the tire, we were back on the road in 30 minutes, thanks in part to the gentleman who stopped.

We went onto El Paso and had a marvelous time, ate wonderful food and visited a mall where I have more pictures to share with you but that will wait till tomorrow.